Amelia Pond wasn't scared of much—except for the crack in her bedroom wall. This was no ordinary crack: it leaked strange whispers into the air and leeched all the safety out of it. An unfortunate situation, since safety is one thing that most definitely that belongs in the air of a little girl's bedroom, especially a little girl who has been wrenched out of her Scottish homeland and plopped down in the English countryside with only a cranky, dispirited aunt for company.
Amelia dreaded the inevitable whispers that would haunt her waking hours and prevent her from sleeping whenever her aunt sent her to bed early for doing something she deemed naughty, like refusing to eat her vegetables or singing a rude song she'd learned from Rory Williams down the lane (which he had learnt from several bullies sang it as they held his head down in a toilet during recess, taunting him for following around Scottish girl with the ginger hair. Girls were gross at that age, don't you know). It's worth noting that neither Amelia nor Rory understood the meaning of such naughty words, not would understand them for a few more years; they only knew the power contained within them, the power to make small children giggle and tall adults gasp squirm.
Yet Amelia had just met a man who had more power than all the naughty words, all the bullies, and all the strict aunts in the whole world. He landed in her yard in a blue box with soaking wet hair, claiming he had fallen through his library into a swimming pool. He ate fish custard but couldn't abide apples, and told her that he'd take her on an adventure away from England, her aunt, and the creepy crack in her wall. He promised excitement, something Amelia was sorely in need of.
Amelia packed her bags. She didn't need much—a few pieces of clothes, a stuffed toy or two, maybe a book, though she imagined she wouldn't have time for reading. She figured the Doctor—that was his name, just the Doctor—could take care of the rest. He took off in the blue box, disappearing into thin air, but he promised he'd return for her.
Amelia Pond. The girl who waited. And waited. She waited all night for the Doctor, but he didn't come back. When her aunt got home the next morning she was furious to find Amelia asleep on top of her suitcase in the garden, bundled up and packed for a trip. Her aunt didn't listen to her stubborn pleas that she was waiting for "the Doctor;" her response was, "We will have to call the doctor if you insist on sleeping in the yard all night, because you'll catch cold, and I don't have the time in my day to nurse a sick child!" The door slammed and Amelia slumped back onto her bed. Her chest hurt badly but it wasn't due to any cold; she didn't know why. Only later on would she be able to identify that feeling as heartbreak, after she experienced it again at age fourteen, when stupid Jimmy Brown kissed her behind the shed and said he'd take her to the spring dance and then spent the whole time making out with the equally stupid Violet Faye instead. Poor teenage Amelia sat outside in the dark and cried on Rory Williams's shoulder, who hadn't asked anyone to the dance, because he thought that the only girl he cared about was going with Jimmy Brown (Rory was feeling decidedly not heartbroken that night, with Amelia Pond's ginger head resting on his shoulder). Yet Amelia Pond knew nothing of this feeling's name at age seven; she only knew that a part of her felt as though it had been yanked out through her ribcage and splintered the bones.
Amelia Pond was grounded for a week for her attempted escape and her sleepover in the garden. As soon as she was allowed out of the house again, she marched down the lane and knocked on Rory Williams's door. Rory opened it only a little bit, scared to be seen chatting with the Scottish girl with the ginger hair (he could still taste the stale water of the toilets on his tongue, and shuddered).
"I need to talk to you."
"Why? Can't you talk to….somebody else?" Rory muttered, trying to avoid her eyes, even though he thought they were the prettiest eyes he had ever seen.
"I need to talk to you! No one else will listen. Come on!" Amelia grabbed his hand and dragged him outside and down the lane. He was helpless to resist her; Rory was a bookish child who had a brain but lacked a backbone. The two of them sat in the field on the edge of Leadworth, where no one could overhear or interrupt, and Amelia told him everything, right down to the raggedy appearance of the mystery man. "The Raggedy Doctor!" she exclaimed.
Rory didn't quite understand. If one were a Doctor, then one would clearly be able to afford shirts that weren't raggedy. Doctors made a lot of money, enough to buy lots of shirts and comic books and Cadbury Flake bars, and he would know: he was going to be a doctor someday.
"I'm going to be a Doctor. Except I won't wear raggedy shirts. And I'll make people better, instead of leaving them in gardens," he blurted out, turning slightly red, though he didn't know why.
Amelia scoffed. "Don't make fun of him. You didn't even meet him. He's coming back for me soon, I swear. I've got to be ready when he does. Will you help?"
Rory couldn't say no. He didn't say no to the drawings, or the stories, or the sock puppets. He didn't even say no when Amy rooted through his drawers for his best dress shirts, the one's his mum made him wear to church on Christmas and Easter with the stupid bow tie that scratched at his throat. The other boys at church would tease him, and he would whine to his mum, "Please don't make me wear it. Bow ties aren't cool." He wasn't terribly sad to see Amy ravage the shirts, making them look suitably raggedy, but he was when his mum found out and sent him to bed without supper that night.
Rory would dress up as the Doctor and do whatever Amy told him to, until he realized that the Doctor was the grown-up and therefore he should be the boss. He finally spoke up and directed the action of their plays, which took them to every planet of the solar system and every time period (Amy was fond of ancient Rome, while Rory preferred the unpredictable expanse of the future). Amy would give suggestions and be delighted at what Rory would do with them; her hysterical giggles made him spontaneously smile, even when he was trying to be serious about the murderous aliens they were about to encounter.
From being the Doctor Rory learned how to stand up for himself at school and how to not be ashamed of being smart and bookish. He got books from the library about medicine and the body and disease, and became even more determined to be a doctor. He wanted Amelia Pond to look at boy Rory the same way she looked at Raggedy Rory. In fact, Amelia had so much fun pretending Rory was the Doctor that sometimes she almost forgot about the real one. That is, until she was lying alone in bed at night, in the drowning dark and quiet, and had to stop her ears against the whispers coming from the crack in her wall.
Days, weeks, months passed, and the crack remained. Amelia knew that as much as she pretended, Rory could not fix the crack in her wall. She knew this when she brought him into her bedroom and asked him what should be done, and he turned red, shrugged, and said, "I don't know, get a plasterer?" She huffed and left him alone in the room, alone with the whispers that he pretended he couldn't hear and chalked up to the whistling of the wind. Where was the Doctor?
As the two kids grew older and taller Rory grew more uncomfortable with being dressed up in raggedy shirts and helping Amelia make rag dolls of her hero. Yet he still did it, because he was beginning to understand his devotion to the redheaded girl in a different way. He didn't just want to run in the fields of Leadworth and pretend they were spacemen; he wanted to hold her hand and kiss her and tell her she was beautiful. She was beautiful. He knew that now, and so did the rest of the boys in Leadworth, many of whom would occupy Amelia's attention almost as much as the Doctor over the coming years. Rory was annoyed; he'd been there for her all along, through the teasing of her accent and the taunts about special Scottish cooties, and yet he was more invisible to her than any of the others.
One day he partially got his wish. The Raggedy Doctor had to save Amelia from the clutches of a particularly nasty Pus-Monster from Jupiter's Red Spot, perhaps inspired by Amelia's recent horrific discovery of her first pimples. Rory vanquished the monster with large stick (the best sonic screwdriver he could find in his garden) and swept her into his arms. Amelia looked deep into his eyes and kissed him dead on the mouth.
Rory didn't know what to do, especially when she broke away from him and said, "Thank you, Raggedy Man!" Was she kissing him or the Doctor? It was unpleasant, this rivalry with an imaginary friend. After all, he was real, and he was there. Where was the Doctor, if he'd ever even existed at all? Cruising the galaxy in his blue box without her, most likely. What kind of grown man wanted to travel with a little girl anyways? It was weird, and possibly illegal, Rory noted.
Rory brought up this idea the next time he saw her, hoping this revelation would upset her enough to earn him another kiss as comfort. Yet instead it earned a reward much less pleasant and more painful—a slap on the face. Amelia marched off in tears and sat in the bushes of her garden, crying all day and night until her aunt found her at dawn, streaked with tears and dirt.
That was when the psychiatrists started. One right after the other, four in total over the course of twelve years, all saying the same horrible thing: the raggedy Doctor isn't real. He's a figment of your imagination. Each time Amelia would sit silently and deal with the constant haranguing, until finally she lost her cool and lashed out with her teeth. That was the punishment of all who dared to doubt the Doctor.
Eventually Amelia grew disenchanted with the fairy tale of the Doctor on her own. She changed her name to Amy and lost her taste for magic. She pretended that she'd know all along the noise from the crack was the wind, even though late at night she still thought she could distinguish words amidst the whispers. She stopped biting psychiatrists and soon after convinced her aunt that she could stop seeing them altogether. She even noticed her loyal playmate in the light that she was meant to see him in, and fell in love, the kind of desperate love she didn't know existed outside of bad movies.
Rory Williams didn't become a doctor; his education stalled at nursing. He grew more and more frustrated at his inability to become the man he had pretended to be for so long. Amy didn't care; she clung to Rory Williams, the one person who had always been there, like a life raft as she changed from imaginative girl into cynical woman, from bored student into costumed Kiss-o-Gram. Yet inside she was still Amelia Pond. The girl who waited. And didn't stop waiting. "He said he'd come back!" she insisted stubbornly, arms crossed, legs stuck out straight in front of her on the psychiatrist's couch.
She was right.